The Selection Committee recommends program candidates who will be confirmed by the Steering Committee. Selection Committee members also advise the Steering Committee on all scientific matters.
Candidates for the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program are assessed based on their academic and research achievements, as well as on personal merit and leadership qualities, without regard to race, religion, gender, ethnicity, or age.
Prof. Chaim Hames is Rector of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of General History.
Prof. Chaim Hames is Rector of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of General History. Hames received his PhD in Medieval History from Cambridge University, and focuses on the inter-religious encounters of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, mysticism, philosophy, apocalypticism, polemics and conversion. He established the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at BGU to analyze the numerous factors involved in the conversion process. The author of over 40 scholarly articles and books on medieval Jewish history, as well as a book on Judaism in contemporary Israel, Hames is an elected member of the European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences.
Professor Noga Kronfeld-Schor is the 17th Rector of Tel Aviv University and a Full Professor at the School of Zoology. She earned all of her academic degrees—BSc, MSc, Teaching Certificate, Master of Health Administration (MHA), and PhD—from Tel Aviv University. She also conducted postdoctoral research at Boston University. In 2001, she joined the university’s faculty as an Alon Fellow.
Professor Kronfeld-Schor is a leading researcher in the fields of ecological physiology, chronobiology, and conservation physiology. Her research examines how environmental conditions affect physiological and behavioral systems, and how changing environmental conditions, such as climate change and light pollution, influence physiology and biological rhythms. Her work integrates basic research with practical questions about climate change, light pollution, one health, and species conservation. Prof. Kronfeld-Schor is recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on biological rhythms in the wild.
Over the years, Professor Kronfeld-Schor has held numerous senior academic and public positions. She served as the Chief Scientist of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and as Chair of the National Council for Civilian Research and Development (MOLMOP). She was a board member of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. She has represented Israel, serving on United Nations committees, and in various international scientific organizations. At Tel Aviv University, she was the Head of the School of Zoology and founded and led the university’s new School of the Environment.
Professor Kronfeld-Schor has published over 150 scientific papers and supervised dozens of graduate students. She has also participated in the Wexner Senior Leadership Program at Harvard University. She has received numerous research grants and awards recognizing her contributions to advancing science, environmental quality, and Israeli society.
Professor Mouna Maroun is Rector of the University of Haifa, where she has been a faculty member for over 20 years. During that time, she has served as Vice President and Dean of Research and Development, and Chair of the Neurobiology Department.
Prof. Maroun was Chair of the National Steering Committee on Enhancing Access to Higher Education for the Arab Society in Israel, and served as a member of the National Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Israeli Council for Higher Education. A neurobiologist, she holds a PhD in psychobiology from the University of Haifa. She did postdoctoral research at the University of Paris — XI in Orsay, France.
Prof. Rony Paz joined the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2007. From 2019-2021, Prof. Paz was Head of the Department of Neurobiology (2019-2021), Dean of the Faculty of Biology (2021-2025), and the inaugural director of the Azrieli Institute for Brain and Neural Sciences (2021-2025). He will assume the role of Vice President of the Weizmann Institute in December 2025. He is currently the incumbent of the Manya Igel Chair of Neurobiology and heads the Manya Igel Centre for Biomedical Engineering and Signal Processing, the Women’s Health Research Center, and the Irene and Jared M. Drescher Center for Research on Mental and Emotional Health.
Prof. Paz studies the interactions between emotions and cognitive processes such as learning, memory, and decision-making. His main focus is on two brain areas, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, believed to be responsible for such interactions. The Paz lab utilizes several approaches, including high-resolution recordings of spatiotemporal activity from single neurons and large neural networks in animal models and human patients, and functional imaging (fMRI) in humans. They employ computational and machine-learning (AI) approaches to understand the neural codes and the functional circuits that underlie learning and memory in adaptive (health) and maladaptive (disease) conditions. Among the issues he seeks to elucidate are the neural and behavioral mechanisms that differentiate negative emotions from positive ones, what role valence plays in memory formation and decision-making, and how we learn and generalize to new environments. His research provides valuable insights into the translational implications for neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism, anxiety disorders, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as the cognitive decline in Parkinson’s disease.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1971, Prof. Paz earned a BSc in mathematics and a BA magna cum laude in philosophy in 1997 and a PhD summa cum laude in neural computation in 2004, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In parallel, he was a senior R&D project leader in the high-tech industry, designing and implementing machine-learning algorithms. He received the prestigious long-term Fulbright fellowship and conducted postdoctoral studies between 2004-2007 at Rutgers University.
Prof. Paz is the recipient of a number of honors, including a European Research Council (ERC) starter (2011), consolidator (2016), and advanced (2023) grant awards, Schaefer Research Scholarship of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (2015), the Minna-James Heineman Research Award for biomedical research (2014), a Levinson award in Systems Biology (2010), a Marie-Curie reintegration fellowship (2009), and a Yigal Alon Fellowship (2008).
Prof. Paz lives on the Weizmann Institute campus with his wife, Netta, and two children, Iddo and Avigayil.
Albert Pinhasov is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson School of Medicine, with a research focus in Molecular Psychiatry and Psychopharmacology.
He was awarded a Master of Science degree (MSc) in 1998 and a PhD in Molecular Biology and Clinical Biochemistry in 2002 at Tel Aviv University. Between 2002-2004, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development. He joined the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University in 2005. Prof. Pinhasov is the Head of the Laboratory of Behavioral and Molecular Psychiatry in the Department of Molecular Biology. His research focuses on the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of mental disorders and the relationship between the development of psychiatric deviations and stress sensitivity. His group demonstrated that inherited susceptibility to stress is linked to gradual development of chronic inflammation, metabolic alterations, brain neurotransmission deterioration, electrical activity accompanied by behavioral disturbances in emotional and cognitive domains, and reduced life expectancy. In October 2020, Prof. Pinhasov was elected as the Rector of Ariel University. Previously, he served as Vice President and Dean for Research & Development and the Head of the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University.
Oded Rabinovitch is the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs of the Technion‑Israel Institute of Technology. He holds the Abel Wolman Chair in Civil Engineering in the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Institute. He has served as Technion Senior Executive Vice President and as the Dean of the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Professor Rabinovitch teaches and leads research in the field of structural engineering. His main field of interest is the structural behavior of layered, composite, laminated, bonded, and sandwiched structures. In particular, he focuses on the analytical, numerical, and experimental characterization of inter-laminar failure mechanisms typical to such structural forms, using nonlinear, dynamic, and stochastic approaches.
Prof. Rabinovitch received his BSc and PhD in Civil Engineering, both from Technion. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Composite Materials at the University of Delaware. In 2002, he joined the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Technion.
Prof. Rabinovitch was awarded the Yanai Prize for Excellence in Academic Education and has been a permanent member of the Distinguished Lecturers list since 2017. He has guided and is guiding 20 MSc and PhD graduate students and published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal papers, many of them with his students.
Prof. Shav-Tal’s research group focuses on dissecting the kinetics of the gene expression pathway in single living cells using fluorescence live-cell microscopy and tagging of DNA and mRNA molecules. In addition to addressing biological questions, they have devised new technical approaches for studying genes at the single-gene level, and performing single-molecule analysis. They have tested new types of fluorescent probes that bind RNAs, which make it easier to detect RNA in patient cells, tissues and biopsies.
Prof. Shav-Tal received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and did postdoctoral research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He has published over 100 articles and won numerous awards, including prestigious research grants from the European Research Council and the National Institutes of Health.
Professor Yaron Shav-Tal is Vice President for Research at Bar-Ilan University, where he is a full professor in the Mina & Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, and at the Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA). Previously, he served as Dean of Bar-Ilan’s Faculty of Life Sciences.
Prof. Shav-Tal’s research group focuses on dissecting the kinetics of the gene expression pathway in single living cells using fluorescence live-cell microscopy and tagging of DNA and mRNA molecules. In addition to addressing biological questions, they have devised new technical approaches for studying genes at the single-gene level, and performing single-molecule analysis. They have tested new types of fluorescent probes that bind RNAs, which make it easier to detect RNA in patient cells, tissues and biopsies.
Prof. Shav-Tal received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and did postdoctoral research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He has published over 100 articles and won numerous awards, including prestigious research grants from the European Research Council and the National Institutes of Health.
Oron Shagrir was named the Rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2025. He holds the Schulman Chair in Philosophy there and is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He was head of the Department of Cognitive Science from 1997-2009 (now the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences). He served as Vice Rector from 2013-2017 and Vice President for International Affairs from 2017-2025.
Professor Shagrir’s research focuses on the nature of computation and representation, the role of computational models in cognitive and brain sciences, and the history of computability and AI. He holds a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science and an MA in the History and Philosophy of Science from the Hebrew University. His PhD in Philosophy and Cognitive Science was from the University of California, San Diego.
Professor Shagrir has received numerous prizes for excellence in research and teaching, including, most recently, the 2023 Covey Award, given by the International Association for Computing and Philosophy, and the 2024 Barwise Prize, awarded by the American Philosophical Association.
Professor Shagrir is the author of The Nature of Physical Computation (Oxford University Press, 2022), and The Indeterminacy of Computation (with Jack Copeland, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He is also the editor, with Jack Copeland and Carl Posy, of Computability: Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond (MIT Press, 2013), and is the author of numerous papers on computation and the mind.